Paramount has had a rough few weeks, with Sacha Baron Cohen’s “The Dictator” underperforming and their now tentpole-less summer after deciding to push back “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” by nine months. Fortunately for them, they’re still very much in the J.J. Abrams business.

Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot, was behind the revitalization of two of Paramount’s ageing franchises, “Mission: Impossible” and “Star Trek,” as well as “Cloverfield” and last year’s Amblin homage, “Super 8.” In addition to the untitled action film announced earlier this year, the studio has picked up a spec script for Abrams’ production company. Titled “Wunderkind,” the story, written by Patrick Aison, is set in the ’70s and follows a young Nazi hunter working for the CIA who becomes reluctantly intertwined with an older Nazi hunter working for the Mossad. It certainly sounds like a no-brainer thriller, and indeed, the minute it came on the market the trade reports that no less than four financiers were scrapping to back the project.=”#”>

Meanwhile, the studio has also bought the rights to the spec script “God Particle” written by Oren Uziel (the upcoming genre mash-up “The Kitchen Sink”). The logline is as follows: “After a physics experiment with a large hadron accelerator causes the Earth to seemingly vanish completely, the terrified crew of an orbiting American space station is left floating in the middle of now-even-more-empty-space. When a European spacecraft appears on their radar, the Americans must determine whether it’s their salvation, or a harbinger of doom.” Despite the premise of an epic-sounding sci-fi movie, the plan is to shoot the whole thing for under $5 million and release it through the studio’s micro-budget division, Insurge Pictures, a la “The Devil Inside.” Too bad. [Variety/Vulture]